The Browser and Importing

The browser

⌘⌥B toggles the browser; ⌘F focuses its search. Five tabs:

• Samples — your audio files, as a list of places rather than one folder at a time. A place is a source: your project (badged PROJECT), Favorites, Recent (the last 20 samples you used), and every folder you have added. Each expands in place, and several can be open at once. There is no step to a parent folder — a place's own root is the top — so the browser never wanders off into /System or /Applications. Add Folder… is the ＋ on the PLACES header — the same ＋ the Library's EDITS section wears; your Music and Downloads are added for you the first time you run Zammoth, and you can remove any of them (right-click ▸ Remove from Places). Places persist across projects, and so does what you left open: the folders and places you had expanded are still expanded next launch. Searching walks every place — including a folder you favorited, which is a place — and groups the hits under the place they came from; the ALL PLACES / THIS PROJECT chips under the search box narrow it. The filter chips beside them are a query in their own right — latch one with no search term and the places list becomes the matches. DRUMS · BASS · VOX · FX classify by file and folder name and add up (DRUMS + VOX shows both); LOOPS keeps only files with a usable tempo, dropping one-shots; ≈ 128 keeps samples at the song's tempo, counting half and double time; KEY Am keeps samples tagged in the song's key or its relative (A minor and C major are the same key here). The last two name the song's own values and disappear when the song has none. A ✕ appears at the end of the row while anything is latched — it clears them all. A file's key comes from its filename tag — pack loops carry one (Loop_Am_128bpm, - F#min -, key C); nothing is guessed. Sample rows show what you are choosing on: tempo · key when the file is tagged with both, otherwise tempo or key with the length. Right-click a file: Add as Track · Set as Reference · Add/Remove Favorites · Reveal in Finder · Add to Library · Add as Sampler Instrument. Right-click a folder to favorite it (a favorited folder becomes a place under Favorites), reveal it, or remove it from Places; right-click Recent or Favorites to clear them. The project place shows only your audio: the app's own working folders there (Archived, Exported, Imported, Recorded, Rendered, and the agent's chats and runs) stay out of the list and out of search, and the list refreshes itself only when a real audio file lands, never for the app's own bookkeeping writes.
• Devices — the whole palette as one list of nine families: INSTRUMENTS (Drum Kit, Sampler, Synth 4OSC — double-click for a new track, or drag one onto a track to make it that track's instrument), MIDI FX, then the audio effects (DYNAMICS · EQ & TONE · COLOUR · MODULATION · SPACE · STEREO · UTILITY), which land on the selected track — dragged into the empty space below the tracks, any device makes a new track carrying it. Double-click or drag to use. Click a family's name to fold it away — the caret works like a folder's, the header keeps its count, and what you fold stays folded next launch, so you can keep the families you use open and see the whole palette at once. Searching flattens the list to alphabetical matches across every family, folded or not.
• Plug-Ins — your scanned VST3/AU plug-ins (with the Scan… button) and your saved .zrack rack presets (drag onto a device dock), in sections: RACKS, then ★ PINNED (click a row's star to pin — a pinned plug-in lives there and nowhere else), then one section per manufacturer, then QUARANTINED (right-click ▸ Trust). Every section folds by clicking its name, exactly like a device family — which leaves whatever row you had selected exactly where it was — and stays folded next launch — which is what makes a real collection navigable. Folds are an idle thing: a search always reaches into folded sections.
• Library — one list in three foldable sections: EDITS (this project's edits — the live one wears a LIVE badge; the ＋ on the section header makes a new one), PROJECT · name (a project you opened read-only with Browse Project…, whose tracks you can drag in), and MEDIA (the pool). Click a section's name to fold it, like a device family; a search always reaches into folded sections. Details in the previous chapter.
• Grooves — the groove pool in two folding sections: IN THIS SONG (templates a clip somewhere is actually using) above the rest of the POOL, so a library of forty doesn't hide the two your song is built on. Each row shows the groove's own shape — its grid and how many cells it spans, e.g. 16ths · 32. Right-click: Apply to selected clip · Export… · Delete from pool; drag a groove onto any clip.

Previewing samples: the headphone (Cue) toggle decides whether clicking a row auto-plays it; with Cue off, clicking selects and the bottom preview strip's ▶ plays. The RAW toggle switches between tempo-synced preview (stretched to your session BPM, pitch preserved — the default) and native-speed playback. Click anywhere in the strip's waveform to preview from that point. All three — ▶, RAW and the wave — light under the pointer and say what they do on hover; the wave takes a left-right cursor, because a click there is a seek.

Dragging out: browser rows drag onto the arrangement (new track or empty lane), Loop Deck channels and shelves, mixer strips, the sampler's waveform, and the device dock.

Importing audio

Supported everywhere (browser, drag-drop, file dialogs): WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, OGG. Drops place and play immediately; compressed formats are decoded to WAV inside the project in the background so the engine and the engineer always work from lossless copies. Multi-file drops give each file its own track. (Standard MIDI files and video are not supported.)

Files whose names carry a BPM tag can auto-warp to your tempo on import (Preferences ▸ Editing ▸ Auto-warp imports, on by default).

Splitting a track into stems (AI)

Right-click any audio track ▸ Split into stems (AI): local AI separation (no upload) into 4 stems (vocals / drums / bass / other) or 2 (vocals / accompaniment). It's a staged background job — expect minutes, watch the ENGINEER cell — and lands the stems as new tracks. The engineer can then measure the artifacts and run AI cleanup on them (see Auto Mix). The agent may invoke separation too; it's shared control like everything else. The stems are files in the project folder named after the source — mix.vocals.wav, mix.drums.wav … Splitting the same audio again reuses them; a different file that happens to share the name gets its own set (mix 2.vocals.wav …).

References

Set as Reference (browser) or the ◎ Reference card loads a reference track for comparison and matching — see Analysis & References.